Spin's Top 40 of 2008

The follow-up to 2006's bleak, beautiful Return to Cookie Mountain, Dear Science is full of wondrous pop experiments like opening romp "Halfway Home," which buries a bubblegum ba-ba-ba refrain under a thick coat of synths and guitars. Such moments are part of the reason Dear Science is SPIN's Album of the Year -- the second such accolade for TVOTR in three years. Parse the lyrics, and the phrase "album of the year" reveals a double meaning. For Dear Science is a document of the absurd, oft-contradictory realities that have governed American lives over the past 12 months, during which waxing anxiety was offset by irrational optimism.

Consider the first two singles, "Dancing Choose" and "Golden Age." One depicts an overstuffed, senses-dulling culture that leaves its victims with "a palette blown to monochrome"; the other is a lush disco anthem -- part Off the Wall, part Wall of Sound -- that promises better times ahead: "There's a golden age comin' round." It's a jolting dichotomy, but an accurate one. Dear Science suggests that, even if the end seems nigh, we all need to keep smiling through the apocalypse. BRIAN RAFTERY

02 Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III♫♫In his syrup-addled reveries, Dwayne "Lil Wayne" Carter babbles about being an alien life-form -- the Afro-futurist orphan -- but in fact, he was pop's most quintessentially compelling 2008 human, rife with quixotic, flesh-based desires, flaws, and gifts. Rapping, Auto-Tune crooning, groping guitar strings, and rasping for air over a digital patchwork of beats and synths, he might've scored the year's best record if he'd been more technically precise or thematically coherent. But then we wouldn't have been as endlessly mesmerized -- or implicated. C.A.

03 Portishead - Third♫Portishead lured millions of us into their film-noir boudoir during the '90s, but on the trio's first album in a decade, the codependent cocktail heartache has degenerated. Beth Gibbons' torch-folk wail is under siege from Adrian Utley's aggressively haunting guitar and Geoff Barrow's mechanical, even militaristic, beats. On "The Rip" and "Deep Water," she pleads over a gently plucked ukulele, but there's little relief. Both taut and unhinged, Third turns soul music into a bare-bulb interrogation of the soul. C.A.

04 Fucked Up - The Chemistry Of Common Life♫Hardcore punk, of the early-'80s genus, was a short, sharp shock, a crazed punch line to the groin. Its poppier and more metallic variants never had the same desperate jolt. But this Toronto crew defibrillate hardcore's heart by going epic -- tidal guitar overdubs, stampeding drums, flute and keyboard ambience. Frontman Pink Eyes' probing bark joins various female voices to rage about faith and hypocrisy, or to just get fucked-up on life. As he growls at the end of "Magic Word": "Alllriiigggghhhht!" C.A..

05 Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes♫Indie rock is awash in bearded young guys channeling the hippie-dippy spirit of their parents' old record collections. But on this haunting debut, Seattle's Fleet Foxes distinguish themselves from the vintage-vinyl crowd by infusing their rootsy retro-pop moves with a sense of mystery that no one's really summoned since Oh, Inverted World changed Natalie Portman's life. Like the Shins' James Mercer, frontman Robin Pecknold is more mood man than storyteller. But his eye for detail can devastate. M.W.

07 Deerhunter - Microcastle♫Listening to singer-guitarist Bradford Cox open up a vein on Microcastle's woozy laments of unrequited love and unmitigated angst, it's hard not to feel protective. Someone so unabashedly openhearted is setting himself up for a lot of pain. But this unintentional masochist's gift for setting nostalgic, almost torchy melodies to amniotic jangle ("Agoraphobia") and smeared garage rock ("Saved by Old Times") suggests salvation -- for us, anyway. When Cox sings about crucifixion on the gorgeously haunting "Calvary Scars," he's the one getting hammered. D.M.

08 Hot Chip - Made In The Dark♫For music that's funny, touching, danceable, and features lots of keyboards that sound like lasers, Hot Chip don't have much competition. The gawky Brits have very nearly perfected their giddy blue-eyed robo-soul. "Wrestlers," which generates a whimsical love song out of squared circle metaphors and equal parts virginal harmony, Nate Dogg-style hooks, and downtempo Detroit techno, is only the most airtight of the album's 13 arguments in favor of information overload. D.M.

09 Coldplay - Viva La Vida♫Achtung Maybe? After the tepid uplift-by-numbers of 2005's X&Y compelled Coldplay to plug into the almighty Enobrain and bandy about talk of "something different," it was reasonable to think a wholesale change was in order. Instead, world-music gewgaws aside, Viva La Vida gave us more than labored reinvention, as nakedly inspirational anthems like the holy-rolling title track and the rousing "Cemeteries of London" burned with the audible passion of a great band getting back on track. D.M.